Nathan Mates wrote:
> I've heard (second or thirdhand) that a lot of companies have
> dropped AlienBrain in favor of Perforce Everywhere. Here at Pandemic,
> we've never used AlienBrain, but went to Perforce a few years ago, and
> it's been great.
Yes, that would be because Alienbrain Totally Sucks.
They've got a lot of nifty features, many of which work unreliably (the
'signoff' feature, for instance, sounds cool but there's no way to
access that data via the API nor is there a way to only "Get Latest
Signed-off Data" which makes it basically useless). They've got a crazy
licensing model (no way to really know what it's going to cost and
floating licenses will make your life a living hell), and the API is
messy as hell (for the most part, to do something through the API, you
create a pair of COM objects, one of which you tell what commands you
want to issue, which gives you back a boatload of XML, which you then
feed to the other object, which sometimes does what you ask and which
returns you more XML which you feed back into the first object to figure
out if the operation succeeded or not. If it didn't, you get to parse
the XML yourself to figure out what went wrong).
Perforce has none of these problems. The command line actually works
(oh yeah, Alienbrain's command-line sup****t doesn't work if you're using
Windows Authentication on the server), and there are published APIs for
about a dozen programming languages. I've used only the Python one but
it's pretty much dead-simple.
Oh yeah, Alienbrain tends to corrupt its own databases fairly regularly,
and the restore operation is tedious and likely to leave you not working
for days at a time. I've never experienced a Perforce database
corruption but have done test-run restores of backed up data and it was
dead simple.
-tom!
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